Happy Bastille Day - and Open Thread

"Feeling Better" - The Teenagers

Cynical, cynical frenchmen singing in English. 

How's it going out there? 

Comments

[T.R. Donoghue]

It's Woody Guthrie's 98th birthday today too.

I love that I work in place where I get kudos for having this picture of Woody over my desk,
http://www.oklahomarock.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/woody_fascists.jpg

A young co-workers response when he first saw it, "That shit is ganster!" Yes it is, yes it is.

[Sir Charles]

But T.R.

Everyone knows that fascists are liberals -- or is it vice versa? Ergo Woody Guthrie wants to kill me with his guitar?

That is a seriously great picture.

[T.R. Donoghue]

It sets a great tone for a labor office imo. Got a great shot of LBJ up in Richard Russell's grill in the Oval Office right next to it.

Watch out, this guitar is going to fuck your face
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCPXfruPylg

2 weeks to the Bar, 3 weeks to Telluride Phish

Back to the library

[Sir Charles]

T.R.

Best of luck -- and remember practice tests, practice tests, practice tests.

[kathy a.]

good luck, TR! and what SC said.

[oddjob]

I'm feeling mellow (thanks to a light, cheaply decent value Zinfandel), and so have a question for the attorneys & law students who frequent this blog.

Years ago, the one time I served on jury duty, after the jury had delivered its verdict The Honorable Nancy Gertner of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts (who had presided over the trial), discussed the case with us for about twenty minutes or so. During that time she answered questions we had (to the extent she was able to), and she also asked a few questions of us. One of the jurors who had particularly caught her attention was a biological scientist (I think maybe he worked at one of the biotech companies in Cambridge, but I forget). She mentioned that she & apparently some of her colleagues, had wondered in particular how he would view the evidence & the proceedings. She seemed particularly intrigued because she knew that a scientist is trained in a manner of inquiry & reasoning that she asserted was rather a bit different from the training one receives as a lawyer.

Science is of course a discipline in which one reasons via induction, and so a scientist always knows in the back of her/his mind that upending everything he/she knows is a possibility, and that NO present explanation of how reality functions is necessarily the last word on the matter.

I also am trained in this manner of thinking and my day job necessarily is grounded in this manner of reasoning (although what I do is not research). Now & again I have wondered what it was about the training one receives as a lawyer that causes the reasoning used in the law to be so different from the reasoning used in science. Is it really so different that Judge Gertner would be moved to note that difference when discussing a case/trial/verdict with a jury (after the verdict had been delivered)?

Would any of you who have been trained in the law care to offer any insights?

[Sir Charles]

oddjob,

I think I would describe it this way. Science is based on empirical observation based on truths that can be replicated and observed in a laboratory like setting.

The law I think relies on more intuitive social conclusions -- the kind of rhetorical, syllogistic reasoning at which a good lawyer excels. (Hopefully something I demonstrate here from time to time.) It relies more on people being able to make the kinds of intuitive leaps that we all do on a day to day basis rather than the strict discipline of genuine science.

[kathy a.]

well, i think it depends. some things are not provable in the way that a scientific experiment might be, such as what exactly was going on in someone's head at a particular point in time -- so that needs to be deduced from the evidence as a whole. but i do not think the process is all that far from scientists approaching a problem that is not fully understood. at least not the way the system should ideally work.

a trial is really not supposed to be a beauty pageant or a debate contest, but a search for the truth. or at least for the facts that are proven, which are then measured up against the requirements of the law in a particular case.

one interesting trend in recent years is prosecutors complaining about CSI making their jurors demand proof of what the prosecutors say happened. which, by the way, is the prosecutors' job, to prove the charges. and i'll grant you, a great many cases cannot be solved by fancy stuff like DNA analysis, but i don't think it's a bad thing, jurors wanting proof.

what is particularly interesting about this complaint is that prosecutors have a long history of over-stating the importance (and the reliability) of various kinds of scientific evidence. there was a report from the NAS last year that found that many kinds of forensic "scientific" evidence is not very reliable -- arson investigation, hair analysis, ballistics, autopsies, fingerprints. there is no accountability and poor training in some of these specialties; and they lack the indicia of scientific reliability, such as peer-reviewed and replicable scientific studies, or even consistent standards.

a lot of the training one receives in law school is learning to read the freaking cases, which are sometimes written in martian, but with more footnotes. it is being able to parse out different principles, which often are in conflict. at least at my law school, there was precious little about actually working with clients, and the advocacy training tended to be a little too pompous for my taste.

[big bad wolf]

oddjob, i agree with SC that empiricism and replication are the big differences. i think that is less a matter of training, as judge gertner suggested, than a matter of what one has to work with. legal cases are all different and thus not replicable; there are similarities between some or many cases, but the same series of events will rarely occur in any two cases, and almost never prospectively. and in many cases the events cannot ethically be recreated. thus, there is a need for more reliance on both logical and intuitive tools.

logic, of course, can be airtight and utterly wrong. intuition and common sense, well, they work well enough day-to-day, but are a rough measure when asked to make the sorts of specific determinations that a jury is asked to make about past events. in a scientific context one would not necessarily accept only the logic (maybe string theory, at least for now?), one would want to see the work. in most legal cases, the "work" is a haphazard series of events that is given a sequence and a significance by reconstruction through some documents, memory (and all of its many flaws), logic and intuition, or common sense.

in my particular job, criminal defense, i function largely as a professional skeptic. why, it is my job to ask, do we think that that logic chain is correct? where is the evidence that would support y in the x-y-z chain? exactly what support do you have for the contention that blood spatters that way or seven whorls is enough to identify one out of six billion people. all good questions in context. most times, however, decisions get made on common sense (which may be rife with prejudices and illogic), experience (which is by necessity very narrow) and a general feeling of how things would likely happen. most of the time that works. when it doesn't, and it doesn't some percentage of the time (small percentage; not insignificant absolute number), we read a story about it and we all tut-tut, and act as if that could never have happened if only we had been there. my experience makes me wonder about that (but then it is narrow) :).

so maybe that is something like what judge gertner might have been suggesting

what did you think of judge gertner? she writes smart, skeptical good opinions, but i hear she is a bit tart-tongued in person, perceiving most as not quite up to her skills (who knows, she may be right)

[kathy a.]

y'all will be pleased to learn that a recent scientific experiment in my personal garage determined that one towel past its prime plus several pounds of cat litter can clean up a quart of motor oil. and if you think i'm going to investigate how this particular oil spill happened, you are nuts, because there is no good answer.

[big bad wolf]

an act of god, kathy, i fell sure of it

[kathy a.]

he's my son, and i am 100% sure he is not a god. plus, he's really really sorry, and he cleaned it up.

[kathy a.]

i really like what BBW wrote, on the more significant matter of how trials work.

[oddjob]

The lid has suddenly been ripped off and the seething tensions and anger among Democrats have now been laid bare. As I noted here yesterday, House Dems are furious that they will be the ones who get shellacked in the midterms -- largely because of the dithering of the Senate and White House on the economy.

This despite the fact that House Dems have already succeeded in doing the heavy lifting on their side on jobs- and unemployment-related measures and other legislation....

[oddjob]

...Whether Sharron Angle could function as a United States senator is unclear, but her future as a televangelist appears bright.